Melissa McCarthy tries too hard to make 'Identity Thief' funny (C)

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Bob Mahoney/Universal Studios

Horrible Bosses' JASON BATEMAN and Bridesmaids' MELISSA MCCARTHY lead the cast of "Identity Thief", an all-star comedy in which a regular guy is forced to extreme measures to clear his name. With everything to lose after his identity is stolen, he'll find out how crazed you can get trying to settle a bad credit score.

‘Oooh, honey, less is more,” the flamboyant hairstylist whispers, out of earshot, at Diana (Melissa McCarthy) as she bombs her head with hair spray and trowels on the eye shadow.

That’s never the case with McCarthy, the bawdy, rude, larger-than-life comic whose big movie break was Bridesmaids. She riffs, tosses back belts of booze and exchanges punches galore as the crass and crude title character in Identity Thief.

But “less is more” might have helped this cumbersome comedy that has Sandy, Jason Bateman’s mild-mannered office drone, trying to wrestle Diana across the country to save his job, clear his criminal and credit records and make this opportunistic crook see the consequences of her actions.

There are car chases, rowdy sex romps in cheap hotels, and lots of scenes where Diana trots out her skills at lying, conning, stealing, copying credit cards and opening handcuffs.

Identity Thief is sputtering long before that midmovie moment when it turns all sentimental and loses its way.

Bateman, the guy America loves to see suffer, isn’t just the passive straight man here — probably a mistake as McCarthy, in her first lead role outside of a TV sitcom, tries too hard. Singing along to every song on the radio, trying to escape on foot (futile), punching those who get in her way in the throat, she sucks all the oxygen out of this thing even when she’s not straining to find an extra laugh in a scene. Bateman’s Sandy spends a lot of time being insulted over his “girl” name — “It’s UNI-sex” — and gets entirely too wise to Diana’s tricks too early on.

There are some huge laughs in this. But making Sandy as testy as Diana, straight off, denies this road trip its comic tension. So as much righteous fun as it is to see the woman who has stolen unisex Sandy’s name and credit and wrecked his life get clocked with a guitar, having it happen 13 minutes into the film robs Identity Thief of its punch.

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